Tag: fee and dividend

An idea whose time has come

In 2010, when Citizens’ Climate Lobby brought 25 citizen volunteers to Capitol Hill, it felt like a big challenge to get enough people to go the distance, to meet with all 535 voting members of Congress. This year, we brought 36 times as many people, and it is looking more like we will need more elected officials to welcome and build relationships with all the citizen lobbyists coming to make democracy work.

The 2015 CCL International Conference brought a record number of citizen volunteer lobbyists together—more than 900—to have real policy discussions with elected officials. It was a breakthrough year in a lot of ways:

For the first time, we had more people attending than could reasonably fit into the meetings we had scheduled.

We had nearly three times as many volunteers to role-play members of Congress in our basic training than we had volunteers total in our first conference.

We heard from not one but two great scientists who have been named to TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people on Earth.

We were joined by dozens of faith leaders, who came to support this message of enhanced civics and substantive policy for a livable world.

There is a cafe I like to visit whenever I am near Villanova University, where I studied and taught for many years. A few years ago, someone staged an informal experiment, putting a stamp on a dollar bill to make it easily identifiable. Staff at this cafe reported receiving the bill in payment no less than 30 times in a 60-day period. That one dollar bill became $30 in gross domestic product (GDP). In this sense, the local economy of the cafe is a phenomenally efficient engine of economic productivity.

The Fifth Annual Citizens’ Climate Lobby International Conference in Washington, DC, spanned a week, with meetings and events from morning till night. More than 600 citizen volunteer lobbyists traveled on their own dime to be part of this historic effort. In three days of lobbying, this incredible team had more than 520 meetings with members of Congress and their staff, as well as meetings at the World Bank and with stakeholder organizations.

If you have never gone to Capitol Hill, to speak with your government, you will likely not understand the power and the beauty of this experience. Conventional wisdom tells us that government is unapproachable and disinterested in the lives and ideas of ordinary people. In fact, the United States Congress is open to constituents, and the people working there are generally eager to hear from the people they represent.

For many Americans, climate change has long seemed like something remote in space and time, a crisis that would affect people in other places a long time into the future. For skeptics, it seemed like we didn’t have to prioritize climate mitigation in order to build a secure and prosperous American republic, even when thinking decades into the future. We are only just now beginning to see that the destabilization of Earth’s climate system is bringing real impacts directly into our communities, in the here and now.

The Third National Climate Assessment, released last month, makes this clear: Climate change is happening now, and it is affecting our economy and our daily lives in disruptive ways, and costs of dealing with this ongoing destabilization will only increase over time. In fact, the report specifically finds that “The observed warming and other climatic changes are triggering wide-ranging impacts in every region of our country and throughout our economy.”

We are now living in the beginning of a period of global transition. Over the next two decades we will be rebuilding the infrastructure of our civilization. We could choose to replace existing infrastructure with something similar, but slightly newer and more expensive… or we could choose to build the economy of the future. There’s no question about which is a better investment.

World Bank Diary, Day 3 Friday, April 11, 2014: Today, at 11:00 am, we presented our second policy session at the World Bank Civil Society Forum. The session was an intimate seminar discussion designed to introduce a draft whitepaper outlining a 2-step global climate solution. We focused on implementing a carbon price first, to transform … Continue reading A Seat at the Table

Fee on carbon-emitting fuels, at the source (mine, well, port of entry)

100% of revenues returned, in equal shares, to every household, every month

Non-protectionist border adjustment, to ensure level playing field

Power over energy economy returned to consumers

Major energy-sector investment flows to clean, renewable resources

The conventional wisdom on action to reduce carbon emissions is that it must be expensive, harmful to the economy, and result in less productive power generation. This is a blatant falsehood based on the outmoded idea that combustion is the most favorable way to harvest energy. All systems of carbon taxation or carbon emissions capping operate on the principle that applying economic pressure in a targeted way can inspire markets to change their behavior. This is the very logic of market-based economic systems.